Which brings up an interesting question...what are the duties of the sats rich in part because they are in areas where my above scenario isn't true to those who are maybe thinner in sats if the goal is to kick fiat? At the very least, if you are going to have privileged nodes, there should be "Broke ass" nodes where transaction fees are small to non-existent. 

Malachi17

I can't host a node or open a channel for reasons I indicated elsewhere. My only hope would be for enough people to send me enough sats using alby or its ilk at the moment to then be able to get a different kind of internet service and be able to afford the new, higher price internet consistently. The FCC then is all ready stopping me from doing so, and everybody else playing rich daddy sats warbucks does the rest. 

bitcoin

I closed all of my lightning channels and I'm shutting down my node.

Nuttall

Things will bifurcate but still nothing is stopping me and you from opening a channel to each others nodes and make payments. No government or centralized node can ever stop us from transacting. As long as you can accumulate capital and can run FOSS this is possible 